Meaningful English Lessons

Nowadays, it is really common to find our students using spinners during class. It might be stressful for the teacher and school authorities to the point of banning them. However, there are options, for teachers to transform trendy toys in a powerful tool to teach and make a positive balance posible. In order to help and support teachers, I would like to share with the ELT community my personal experience using spinners to teach. In some of my recent classes, young adults and kids have been using them a lot. At first, I asked them to stop using the spinners but later, after receiving one as a present I began to use it during my office work time. Suddenly, while thinking and spinning I came up with an idea. I interrupted some of my colleagues and asked them to answer an opened question during the spinner motion time  forcing them to speak. And, even when they seemed to have no more words, I asked more follow up questions as hints. As soon as the spinner stopped, they immediately c

ONE DAY TWO YEARS AGO...       Long ago, I began teaching English, in order to make things different I started new practices for me and the students. However, my practices were not allow by the school policies, I was obligated to accomplish just the lesson plan without trying any new idea; as a result, I did everything I considered necessary to develop my ideas. Those times were full of passion that made me keep on believing. Suddenly, after some years I formed part of a singular high school in Valencia, Venezuela that allowed me to teach reading and writing skills. That was the right moment to develop in a free way my integrated approach to English teaching.      As I was teaching  using an integartive approach through poetry, arts, drama, music students everyday had opportunities to reflect and express themselves. Those reflections were, of course, based on the poems, plays, symphonies, popular music/art or any different input provided they had to read, listen, watch and apprec

I have been always interested in building a new class scheme based on the student and the teacher essential emotional needs. We, as human beings, need to get motivated for every single aspect of the life and academic studies are not the exception. In response, we have created different solutions and resources to get students’ attention, but all the resources we use or we create are not enough. They just motivate a part of students’ emotions and later they do not work well anymore. Being aware of those facts, I decided to look for a way to establish a connection between motivation and teaching practices, new schemes where both teacher and students develop a strong, meaningful environment for learning and teaching. In this occasion, I will be briefly explaining the first steps for developing meaningful English lessons, and the challenges for this practice.  Meaningful English Lessons Based on my practices and researches, a meaningful English lesson includes emotions exciteme

The Success of an English Lesson       The success of an English lesson will lay on how meaningful it is for the students. This fact has led teachers all around the world to create different ways to catch students’ interests so they can achieve the communicative skills in English. There are different ways in which these motivational practices can be done.         On my own experience, I have tried by using music, literature and art. Using one of these three at the time or one by one I have experienced how they all provoke different emotions on every single student and the whole group.  Music, literature and art deal with emotions encode in the written, oral and symbolic language that evoke similar emotions on the person. Emotions come before the language and it is the language that translates emotions into written or oral discourses. When a student or a whole class have experience the connection between the art input  and their own life facts they are ready to communicate and sh